


hard feelings

by fliptomybside



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Canon Universe, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-06
Updated: 2019-07-06
Packaged: 2020-06-22 06:39:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19661866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fliptomybside/pseuds/fliptomybside
Summary: high school changes things for all of them.





	hard feelings

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, I wrote this in 2017 and I don't completely hate it so here it is. Unfinished, unbetaed, etc. Just some vague Mike/Eleven angst ft. concerned Dustin and Max.

Mike’s hair is starting to curl at the base of his neck.

This is what she thinks about in calculus now. Mike’s hair and what it is and isn’t doing instead of functions and L’Hospital’s Rule. She can tell he’s actually paying attention today by the way his brow’s furrowed and how tightly he’s gripping his pencil, so hard that his knuckles are white.

Two months ago, he would’ve called her after school begging for help, but that was two months ago. Now, he’ll walk her halfway home but peel off with a wave and a quick smile, easy and effortless and always leaving her to trudge the last few blocks home alone. 

The squeak of the marker on the dry erase board wriggles its way into her brain and she tears her eyes away from Mike’s neck.

She hasn’t taken a single note, and the bell’s about to ring, but it doesn’t matter. She’ll figure it out. Catch up later, because even now math makes more sense to her than people do. It’s comforting. Certain. If x, then y. Two plus two will always equal four. Mike will always walk her home from school and call her on the walkie talkie at 11:00 before he goes to sleep. Except he doesn’t anymore, and that’s why El doesn’t like people. They’re unpredictable, they disregard every variable she tries to account for, and they don’t follow the rules. 

There’s a ring of blood around the nail of her right index finger when she looks down at her hands. Mike’s mom used to tut at her over her cuticles, but El hasn’t been over lately, so they’re ragged and she can’t seem to stop picking at them. 

“Hey,” Mike whispers, just as the bell rings. 

El looks over at him so fast that she can feel her neck crack, but he’s looking at the boy sitting behind her. She’s frozen in her seat for a second, can’t tear her eyes away from the tiny freckles underneath his eyes and how they were always the last thing she looked at when he kissed her.

But it’s been months, even though her brain says two months is miniscule in the grand scheme of things. It just feels like it might as well be a different universe, because all he does is flash her a quick smile before he heaves himself up and out of his chair, tall and skinny and the only thing she wants so much it hurts.

-

“El,” Dustin says, flapping his hand in front of her face, “Earth to El, where’d you go?”

She squeezes her eyes shut for a second and drags a hand through her hair and then blinks until Dustin comes back into focus.

“Sorry,” she croaks, and winces at how she sounds. 

“You sound like shit, what’s wrong?”

El shakes her head and pulls herself closer to the table. The noise of the cafeteria is almost enough to drown everything out, but not quite. 

“I think I’m getting a cold,” she says, pulling her celery and peanut butter out of her lunch bag. 

Dustin eyes her suspiciously, mouth full of peanut butter and a smear of marshmallow fluff on his upper lip.

“You’ve got,” she starts, and rubs at her upper lip.

He grins widely at her and lasciviously licks his lips until it’s gone.

“You’re disgusting,” she says, because he is, but she smiles anyway.

“I have another half if you want it, your body’s probably rebelling against the celery you’ve been eating for the last month. It actually has a negative caloric value, which begs the question, why are you eating it in the first place? The whole point of eating is to sustain yourself, not deplete your energy reserves eating sad vegetables.”

She shrugs, stares him down, and takes an obnoxious bite of a stick of celery. It’s loud in her ears, even though the cafeteria’s noisy, and it does taste terrible. It tastes terrible, but her face isn’t moony anymore. She has cheekbones, as it turns out, they were just hiding before. Sometimes it feels like she’s seeing herself for the first time when she looks in the mirror, and sometimes it feels like she’s seeing someone else.

“Healthy,” she says belatedly, after she’s chewed and forced herself to swallow. 

It’s even worse without peanut butter. Dustin stares at her and swallows hard. 

“At what cost,” he says, shutting his eyes and shaking his head. 

El just shrugs and forces herself to eat the rest of it, watery and tasteless. There are a million words ricocheting around in her head, but she can’t get any of them out. 

-

She used to love gym class. It was a chance to get out all the energy that built up under her skin sitting still all day, listening to teachers droning on about things she didn’t care about. 

It’s different now. The locker rooms smell worse every year, she thinks, and she never feels the right amount of self-conscious about getting changed in front of everyone. 

Every time it reminds her of the first time she met Mike. Met all of them, really. She blushes at the memory of it, how she didn’t even know what she was doing wrong at first. Sometimes she thinks about what would happen if she did that now. Showed up on his doorstep in the rain, soaked to the bone, hoping that he’ll let her in again. Making her way up the stairs to his bedroom and standing in front of him. Pulling her clothes off and letting them fall to the floor and just waiting. Waiting to see what he’d do. 

She shakes herself out of it. 

“We should skip, El, it’s basketball again this week,” Max says urgently from her left. 

She hasn’t started getting changed yet, but El’s already got Mike’s old science camp t-shirt on. He probably doesn’t even realize she still has it. She remembers vividly the day he gave it to her. Lent it to her, technically, but he never asked for it back, so she just kept it. It was freshman year and the last time she slept over Mike’s, and only because Hop was out of town and didn’t want her to be alone. She’d slept in Mike’s bed and he’d taken the floor, and given her the t-shirt when she realized she’d forgotten one of her own. 

That was three years ago, and she still remembers lying there wide awake, staring at the glow in the dark stars on Mike’s ceiling. 

“El,” Max says again, and El realizes she’s been standing frozen in front of her open locker for too long. “Let’s go, c’mon, this is our chance.”

“Max--” she starts, but Max just takes picks up her backpack, shoves it in her hands, and grabs her arm.

-

“See how much better this is,” Max sighs and stretches her legs out in front of her. 

Sitting on the bleachers is a lot nicer than being stuck inside playing basketball, even if it’s colder than El would like.

“It is,” she acknowledges, wrapping her hoodie tighter around herself. 

“Why’re you being so moody? Dustin caught me after lunch and said you were being weirder than usual. And that you’re eating celery again, what the fuck? What’s going on?”

El can feel herself blushing. It doesn’t happen that often, but here, with Max looking at her intently, all big blue eyes and perfect hair, she can’t stop it. 

She shrugs.

“Tired,” she says, because she is, and she can’t just--share everything she’s thinking. She learned years ago that that was never a good idea.

Max rolls her eyes but she doesn’t shove her, which El’s grateful for. 

“I know it’s Mike, so there’s no point in trying to hide it. From me, of all people, the one who knows you best. Besides him, obviously. But I’m giving him a run for his money, okay.”

El forces out a laugh and then bites down on her lip hard enough that she can taste the blood. 

“It’s fine, Max. We’re--it’s fine? We’re friends.”

“Please don’t lie to me, it’s annoying. It’s annoying and it reminds me of when we just met and you were jealous.”

El really does laugh at this, feels it bubble up in her chest, a little bit hysterical.

“I wasn’t jealous, god, Max. I was like, thirteen, I didn’t know how to be jealous.”

Max slides closer to her on the bleachers. El can feel the warmth of her body radiating through their hoodies where Max presses her arm against hers. 

“You were, but it’s okay. I get it, okay? He was your person. He is your person.”

The way she says it is so sure. A statement, not a question, and El wishes she were that sure about it. She wants to believe like Max does. It’s intoxicating, letting herself think that she and Mike are a sure thing. That they’ll always be together, somehow. But it’s not a sure thing, that’s the problem. She doesn’t have any claim on him, not really. She knows that now that he’s slipping away incrementally. It might feel like every cell in her body is screaming when she sits next to him, but she’s frozen at the same time.

“He’s not, though.”

She lets her head fall onto Max’s shoulder, inhales the flowery scent of her shampoo, and tries to focus on the cold air instead of what’s going on in her head.

“Have you talked to him? Boys are dumb, I know you know this by now. Don’t let it go upside down because he’s being fucking stupid and like. Pretending he doesn’t know you.”

El sighs. The tip of her nose is numb, and it’ll be red all through eighth period, she knows. She snuggles closer into Max’s side, nudges at her until Max slings her arm around El’s shoulders.

“It’s not even that bad,” she starts, but it’s still like she can feel all the energy leaving her body when she says it, because sometimes it feels that bad. “It’s just--it’s not the same, and he hasn’t kissed me in two months and he doesn’t walk me all the way home anymore or radio me good night and I don’t know what changed.”

She feels Max sigh more than she hears it. 

“Pretty sure they get dumber as they get older, but. You could talk to him, you know? I know that’s rich coming from me, but it’s what my mom always says. Even though she won’t take her own advice.”

El unfurls her arms to check her watch. It’s a short period today, and she knows they should head back in soon so they can blend in and not get caught, but she’d also be okay if they never went back.

“Not good at talking,” she says, wrapping her arms around herself again. 

“You’ve always been good at talking to him,” Max says softly, “And you’ve always been his favorite. You should’ve seen him when I first started hanging out with Lucas and Dustin, he totally embodied the whole if looks could kill thing.”

El snorts out a laugh, because she’s actually done that. Like, literally, killed people just by looking at them. Mike doesn’t even come close to what she’s done, and maybe this is how she has to pay for it. 

“Sorry, fuck, you know what I mean,” Max says in a rush, but it’s not even something that El can muster up more than a pang of guilt for anymore. That, too, feels like something that happened to some alternate universe version of herself. 

“I know,” she says softly, more to bleed out the tension in Max’s body than anything else. 

It’s easy to lapse into silence. Silence is always her default. It’s safer than talking and saying the wrong thing and not realizing it until it’s too late. 

They sit in the quiet, huddled together until El hears the bell ringing in the distance. 

“Might as well just go home,” Max says, nudging El’s knee with her own, “pretty sure Will can get through earth science on his own for once.”

“Probably,” El hears herself saying.

It is weird, taking a class and knowing that there’s so much more hidden underneath them than the teacher knows to cover. That some scientific discoveries aren’t shared, and maybe that’s a good thing. 

“Definitely,” Max says, tugging her up, “c’mon, if you hurry, you can beat Hop home and he’ll never know you skipped.”

Wednesday, El’s brain spits out. Hopper always comes home early on Wednesdays so they can watch Cheers after dinner and homework. It’s him making an effort to be there, and so she makes an effort not to count the number of times that he’s been late for it. Three one five. Wednesdays, three one five.

-

She’s still in the shower when she hears him come in. The loud snick of the locks still makes her ears ring, even though the shower almost drowns it out. Three hundred and fifty three days. Three hundred and fifty three times that sound filled her with dread and excitement. Maybe today, she’d think, maybe this is it. Mike. Mike, Mike, Mike.

Now, outside of the deep recesses of her brain, the sound’s just ordinary. It means eggos for dinner and watching Cheers on the couch after she pretends she’s finished her english homework. It means Hopper letting her wiggle her cold feet under his legs and not complaining, and it means the smile he doesn’t try to hide when she calls him dad. 

El knows she should feel relieved at having timed it perfectly enough that he’ll never think she skipped out on her last two classes, but it still feels a little like her chest is caving in. 

She’s freezing the second she shuts off the water, and she hurries out of the shower and into her towel. The mirror’s fogged over, and she looks like someone died when she clears it and gets a glimpse of her reflection. She blinks at herself, cheeks still holding on to a tiny bit of roundness. There’s a spot on her chin and her hair’s barely past her shoulders, already starting to curl. It’ll be frizzy and wild in the morning, and she’ll be too tired to straighten it. Then she’ll hate herself for it for the rest of the day. She blinks again and tries to shake herself out of it. She lets her mouth drop open, just enough that her cheekbones make an appearance, and she wonders absently if it’d be socially acceptable to walk around like this all the time.

Hopper has the tea kettle on by the time she pads into the kitchen, fuzzy socks that Joyce got her last Christmas on her feet. They’re obnoxious pink and black stripes, but they’re perfect. 

“Tea?” 

“Yes, please,” she says, flopping down at the table and unzipping her backpack. 

Hop’s still in his uniform. Privately, El thinks he could go up a size, but she knows better than to broach the subject. She’s lost count of how many diets they’ve tried to follow together that have only ended with the two of them in the kitchen together at midnight, both going for the vanilla ice cream they always have stashed in the freezer.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm [here](http://polaroidgirlfriend.tumblr.com) on tumblr.


End file.
